Antenna mounting systems may be employed when mounting an antenna assembly at a location that may experience vibration or shock loading. These locations may include various vehicles (land-based vehicles, water-borne vehicles, airborne vehicles, etc.), or ground-based locations that may experience seismic loading. Vibration and shock loading may cause damage to an antenna assembly, such as unintentional component contact, mechanical damage (e.g. yielding, rupture, etc.), fatigue damage, loosening of components, separation of electrical connections, and others. Vibration and shock loading may also result in degraded system performance, including alignment errors from transmitted vibrations or poor alignment controller feedback performance, erroneous sensor measurements, and the like. Thus, mounting systems may be designed to isolate an antenna assembly from vibrations or shock loading in order to improve performance of components sensitive to such conditions.
Isolation provided by such mounting systems may add one or more degrees of freedom between an antenna assembly and the location to which the antenna assembly is mounted. For example, compliance of a mounting assembly used to isolate the antenna assembly from vehicle vibrations may introduce one or more translational degrees of freedom and/or one or more rotational degrees of freedom between the antenna assembly and the vehicle. Although the degree(s) of freedom may attenuate transmission of certain vibrations from the vehicle to the antenna system, the degrees of freedom may also impair the antenna systems ability to track a target device, such as a satellite or another vehicle. For example, unconstrained translation and/or rotation may introduce an alignment error of antenna assembly alignment controller. Unconstrained rotation between an antenna assembly and a vehicle may be particularly detrimental, because the effect of angular pointing error may be amplified over a distance between the antenna assembly and a target device.